


This Sweet Life

by northerntrash



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mythology, End of the World, Environmentalism, Greek Mythology - Freeform, Hopeful Ending, M/M, Multi, Non-Linear Narrative, Nymphs & Dryads, Urban Fantasy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-20
Updated: 2016-05-20
Packaged: 2018-06-09 16:22:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,258
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6914518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/northerntrash/pseuds/northerntrash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a windowsill, that still catches the sunlight sometimes. Shells and river stones litter the surface, and some careful hand has moved them into the patterns of the constellations, both those still in view and some that have disappeared. Between them, small seedlings are planted in old containers, sometimes even in the deeper shells themselves. There is a fine layer of dust covering them; the room inside it still and quiet. The seeds struggle to grow; they are brown, and weak. </p><p>In which mankind forgets, civilisation crumbles, and three nymphs are left behind to watch it all, together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This Sweet Life

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first entry for The Hobbit Big Bang 2016! Thank you for taking a punt on this slightly ambiguous story, it means a lot to me. A big thank you needs to go out to the wonderful [Linddzz](http://linddzz.tumblr.com/) \- this was the first fic that I started writing for this pairing, and it is entirely their fault that I got into it in the first place. 
> 
> I've had the opportunity to work with some phenomenal artists this year - I am so grateful to them for their support, advice, and words of wisdom - as well as the incredible artwork that they have created. I'll add links to this as and when art is uploaded, but in the meantime - thank you so much guys!  
> By the always wonderful [procoffeinating](https://procoffeinating.tumblr.com/post/144651994543/this-sweet-life-by-northerntrash-for-hobbit-big)  
> By the amazing [hobbitymarymortstan](https://hobbitystmarymorstan.tumblr.com/post/144666427100/an-illustration-of-the-lovely-trio-living-in)  
> By the phenomenal [mithrilbikini](http://mithrilbikini.tumblr.com/post/144668990947/art-for-the-wonderful-and-talented)  
> By the darling [bracari-iris](http://bracari-iris.tumblr.com/post/144677602210/a-couple-of-illustrations-i-did-for)  
> More to follow!
> 
> For additional scraps of poetry and edits of my own, you can always check out [the tag](http://northerntrash.tumblr.com/tagged/this_sweet_life) for this fic on my tumblr!

_Things begin, and then they end._

_This is the way of existence, the only constant that this world has ever known, the only part of it that we can hold true to._

_We think of endings with fear, with hopelessness, with the belief that it can only bring sorrow, and grief – but sometimes, endings are a thing of hope, of rebirth, and renewal._

_Sometimes they are necessary: they bring the new._

_There have been many endings, in all the years that this earth has known._

_This is the story of one of them._

 

* * *

 

He had been here for more years than he could remember.

This life, this sweet life, without end and so full of loss: when he had been young and newly formed, and he had worn crowns of wild thyme in his hair, he could not have imagined how much his life would come to change. _Leimakid,_ they called him, or _Leimoniad_ sometimes – nymph of the meadows, of the gentle lands, the rolling fields and the sunlit grasses full of a thousand flowers, the bees his constant companions, as were all the small creatures and birds that had known the land as well as he.

He had been content, when his lands had been his own.

Once this had been his meadow, though now you might not believe it, to look at its muddied river, its towering buildings, the soot engrained into the stone, the death, the sweet taste of pollution in the air: puddles of oil are a more common sight to see than the tormentil that he had once enjoyed growing – once in fact they had sprung up around his feet without him having to do anything at all.

But there is only him left to remember what this had once been, and sometimes even he finds that hard to manage. The streets of this city are old and the pavements are cracked, the sky above a steely grey, and there is little that would make you guess that once it had been a place of a sunny beauty, a gentle spread of sweet grass and wildflowers as far as the eye could see. But it had been untouched by the hand of man then – and man comes, _man always comes_ , the steady beat of their encroaching footsteps a litany that no immortal can escape, no matter how hard they might try.

And oh, how they try.

At first man had come and had looked upon the grassy verges with wonder at their beauty, and he was glad. They saw in it then all the touches of the divine, the glow of his blessing among the haze of pollen and grass seed, and they had known to leave him be. Those had been good days, better in many ways than even the days when man had not walked this earth, for what is beauty without eyes to see it – what is hard work, without appreciation? Bilbo had smiled at the sight of man’s wide eyes, of their pleasure, of the sweet wine that they poured into his earth in gladness for the beauty of the world.

But time marches on, ever on, for all that you might dig your nails in the earth in an attempt to stop its movement, and the sound of man grows louder in the darkness of the night, full of promise and expectation and the threat of progress – progress – _always progress._ Mankind cannot stay still – it is not in their nature to leave things the way that they were, for there is a seed of discontent in them, fuelled by the knowledge of their short time on earth, a seed that blooms into a desperation to change, to confront, to leave their mark upon the fragile earth, that gentle thing which takes the brunt of their insecurity.

They did not leave him alone for long.

The meadow changed.

They put boundaries around it first, locking him in. He had always known the limits of his own realm, how far his meadow stretched before it met that which was ruled by someone else, but it seemed that man could not see those divisions in the same way. His brothers and sisters suffered the same, and where once their land joined now they found wooden fencing in their way, from trees felled close by. He heard the weeping of the _Dryads_ from a distance as their groves and woodlands were pulled down, one tree at a time, and his heart ached for them.

The sound disappeared, soon enough, along with the trees.

Then came dividers running through his land, and to Bilbo it felt like a wound each time they chopped his meadow into smaller pieces, those walls and fences like living scars on the skin of his land.

 _This is mine,_ he wanted to scream aloud. _Why do you do this to that which is not your own?_

It took him a long time to realise that man did not see it that way, that they did not understand that the world did not belong to them.

Then came the buildings, slow and small at first, and he cowered from their fires at night, unseen and unheard even as he pleaded with them not to plough the earth that he had spent so long nurturing to seed. But farm they did, and he startled the first time he heard cattle lowing to each other in the morning mists, the sunlight catching on their dun hair.

He still remembered the young man who had first dug his blade into the earth of Bilbo’s meadows, still remembered the way it had hurt him, the way he had checked his skin on reflex to see if the ichor that flowed through the veins of immortals was pouring from some impossible wound.

But it hadn’t been so bad, not then. He dug hands into the furrows left in his earth by ploughs and felt new life there, and could not be too angry. He hovered at the periphery of the boundaries that they created around their settlements and heard their stories, heard the names that they gave to the stars above them (so different to their real names), heard their lives and their hardships and their hopes and their dreams, and he was a kind-hearted soul, at the end of it, so though it hurt to see his home slowly altered, he tried not to hate them for it.

_Can you hate someone who didn’t know what they were doing?_

He might have been alright, had they stopped there, but they didn’t. Roads came, and bigger buildings in stone, and soon enough the tides of change moved the lands enough that a river cut through the land that had once been his own, the land that he was tied to still. Diverted for its water, it grew ever deeper, and though Bilbo found some comfort in the company of the _Naiad_ that wandered up and down its length from time to time, he sore missed the silence of his earth as he remembered it. Now it pulsed with sadness at its treatment, and nothing he could do could calm its ragged nerves. The life that it had always had, as long as he had known it, began to drain away: the certain vitality of existence was taken from it before he could think of a way to stop it.

In the distance he heard the mountains scream as they were quarried.

The remaining trees had grown silent years before: their voices, once as distinctive as those of the winds, were heard no more by anyone, immortal or no.

Man forgot about their kind: no longer was corn poured on the altars for him, no more did wine wet the earth with thanks. Now all that came were the tears of their own kind, and his own too – and the pollution, ever the pollution, that they poured into his own good earth and the winds and rains that fed it , the soil that he felt deep within his bones. He didn’t need their belief to exist, didn’t need their sacrifices or prayers, but as the years wore on the earth grew quieter, a slow death, and as it did he felt his own strength wane, for he was nothing but a creature of the earth.

Still they could not hear his protests, could not hear his cries, and they continued to build, higher and higher.

His meadow became a town in time, and soon after a city. For a time the place had been new and bustling, but all things must come to change, and as it grew it began to die. The city was abandoned over time, old stone around the river slowly falling apart, and towering steel and glass tarnished by the filth in the air out towards the north, where once the pious had poured libation for his pleasure. He hurt at the sight of the place, as he wandered the streets, still hidden to the people who lingered still between the crumbling walls of closed factories. They were as lost as he, he couldn’t help but think: the abandoned and forgotten, left behind by the rest of their people, who had escaped the gaping maw of the dying city to find a better life.

These were the people who could not leave, and he felt for them, for he was as trapped as they were.

His siblings, the other _Leimakides_ of the meadows of the world, were gone now: one by one their meadows had met the same fate as his had, destroyed under concrete and the blades of industrial machines, and they had left this plane for the one beyond, the realm waiting for those who could not die but whose times were over, a pale and beautiful place full of memory and the stillness of timelessness. There the forgotten Gods lingered under endless violet skies and a sun which had burnt to embers millennia before, content enough in their obscurity.

They waited for him, his former kin, he knew that. And there was peace to be found in that soft shades of the sweet-scented trees there, perhaps even happiness of a kind. But Bilbo- Bilbo could not bring himself to leave, not whilst he could still feel the earth below the concrete barely living, not when he could coax wildflowers out through cracks in the pavement, not when this was all that he had ever known.

And though his meadow-kin were gone, was he alone?

Not quite.

 

* * *

 

He did not see them every day: nor so was it even every week as man would count it, for their own roles in this world often absorbed them as his own did. He spent his days now walking circuitous, slow routes around the city-that-had-once-been-his-meadows, from day break to night fall. Each time he would find a new crack to grow a flower, a new abandoned window-box to bolster, a new something-or-other whose function he did not know but that he picked up and kept anyway, wrapped up with the madness of it all. Mankind were a strange and beautiful race, he thought with some bitterness, a race half in love with their own mortality. They left so much behind them in a strange attempt at legacy, as if they thought that the earth would truly care.

His days were silent now that the earth did not speak to him: the sky seemed to laugh bitterly whenever he thought too long on what had been.

The days he saw them were the right kind of quiet: company enough to distract him from his grief, distraction enough to allow him laughter, pleasant evenings, and even hope, at times.

He had met the _Naiad_ first, when his river had been diverted: he had not spoken to him much in those early centuries, too distracted in his charge and his attempts to save his earth. He had never had much cause to talk to any of the water-lot before then, but for the lovely old man of the spring that had often fed his growing ventures (he too was gone, lost when silt and then concrete slowly choked his gentle spring). This one played the pan-pipes, and Bilbo could often hear him singing, even now: the sound of it lifted his spirits on many a lonely night, for what greater sound to a creature that no one could see but a sound that felt as if it were only for him?

The _Naiades_ were a spirited lot, children of the fresh water, and the work of this one was the river in which he had first found himself: just as Bilbo had kept his earth free of pollution and his plants growing strong, so too had Bofur kept his waters clean and encouraged the fish to swim in plenty. _Potamide_ he was: _Naiad_ of the river. He pressed stones worn smooth by water into Bilbo’s hands, and his skin seemed always to be a little cool and damp to the touch no matter how long he had been on land, as if the deep waters of his river ran constantly under his skin.

One of the _Asteriae_ had come next: children of the stars, and a mysterious lot even among nymphs themselves, for in the great past they had secluded themselves on mountains to be closer to those constellations that they loved. But this one had been forced from his mountain when first a fortress had been built on its top, and then later its sides mined for stone, its height greatly diminished. Thorin had wandered the lands of the earth for some time in his exile from the lands that he had known, until he had come across Bofur singing one day in a creek: the _Potamide_ , always welcoming, urged him to come to the city where Bilbo now dwelt, for the brightness of man was drowning out the night sky wherever one might go, but at least here he might have the company of others who knew his pain.

Thorin’s hair was black at the night, but threaded through with the starlight that always seemed to burn behind his eyes: just as Bofur’s skin was always a little too cold, Thorin’s was always just too warm, as if the stars had set him aflame many years ago for love with a fire that had never been extinguished.

Thorin brought old maps of the stars over for Bilbo and Bofur to look at sometimes, some human crafted and some of his own creation, protected over the centuries. He followed the lines of constellations with his finger, ones still in the sky and ones whose lights had died, and he told them both the stories he knew, whispered to him from the darkness of the skies in the dead of night, when there had been no one and nothing but himself and the spiralling galaxies open for his eyes. The three of them lay on wooden boards warped with age, one too warm and one too cold and Bilbo somehow in the middle, as if to balance the temperature. They lay there and the two earth-bound nymphs listened to Thorin’s stories, and wondered if Thorin might have become a star himself, had his determination and pride not kept him here on the earth, for he spoke at times of the stars as if they were his kin, pointed out the Archer and the Lion as if they were beloved children of his, not just distant lights in the night.

Bilbo’s heart ached for Thorin: they kept the lights dim, when he was over, for he preferred the shadows, but his eyes cast enough of a silvery glow that they never struggled to see the charts spread out around them.

Bofur had never gone in for maps in quite the same way: the currents that he had always followed were the lines in his palms (just as Bilbo’s earth made up his bones, just as Thorin’s stars were always in his eyes) for all that they were ever changing – and that change makes it difficult to track them into any kind of course, and nor should people try, Bofur often remarked, for they are a free thing, just like him.

Besides, he was often to joke: paper does not live so well in the water.

But he came with stories too, and instead of maps he showed them with little songs of his own design, with stones and shells plucked from river beds along the way, with the flicker that the delicate scales that grew on the inside of his wrists made when they caught the light as he gesticulated wildly – and his stories were always so full of life. The great river creatures he had seen, the under-bank caves full of treasure, the fish that he had chased, the time that he came upon a frog who was convinced that they were a Prince – all of them are good natured and spoken with such enthusiasm that the other two could almost have believed that they had been there with him.

Bilbo keeps those stones and shells, lines his windowsills and shelves with them around the flowers that he still grows in plant-pots and whatever other receptacles he can grow things in. Thorin leaves him maps sometimes too, and he pins those up over the cracks in the white-washed walls.

And what does Bilbo do, when the two turn next to him?

He threads their hair with the wildflowers that grow now in his window-boxes rather than his meadows, and he sings them the songs that he uses to call the plants from the earth, and the small flowers growing around the room glow and bloom all the brighter at the sound of him: he lives now in an abandoned building by the river, with walls crumbling from the damp, and sometimes he sings loud enough that the moss on the outside walls creeps around the windowsills to listen. They bring him grass sometimes, pulled from riverbanks or pavement cracks, and he brings them back to live and delights the others in reading where they picked it from the strata of lines within their narrow stems.

He tells them the names of all the bees that live in a hive on his roof that he cares for so tenderly: they are his friends, and the eternal hive mind of bees means that they remember him from all those thousands of years ago, when first he appeared and met them. The busy workers tell him of all that they have seen and he sings their humming songs to the other two, so that their stories may live on outside of their hive.

They find solace in his apartment, the place where the three of them can come together. The building is derelict and abandoned, but they do not feel the cold and no one can see them, and he has enough of his old spark left in him to turn away any humans who come too close to his door. From his window he can see the river below him and the stars above him, and even in the long weeks in which he does not see the other two he finds comfort in the sight of them, in the glass-dark surface of the water with its slow currents beneath, in the flickering lights above – there are few street lights in this abandoned part of town, and the darkness lets the stars show all the brighter. When they are here they will often find Thorin on the roof at night, lying on his back with the wave of his hair about his tired face, his eyes bright and shining, his body very still as if his mind is far away, in some silent conversation with the sky above him.

Likewise, Bofur is often in the cellars, partially flooded now and to blame for the damp – he sits cross-legged in the puddles and talks to the newts that have made their home down there, to the small microscopic organisms that only he knows. His scales – pale and iridescent, appearing at the inside of his elbows, wrists, down the long line of his spine, the hollow of his throat – glow with their own light in the dark, a blue-green-silver that is beautiful to behold.

They want him to leave with them, he knows this: he has considered it often. He knows where his kin have gone, where all their kind have gone, and wonders often what that pale world is like, the one beyond this one, where they will be free of their ties to this world, free of their sadness. He knows Bofur would have gone a long time ago had he not wanted to leave Bilbo alone in this place: he has watched all his kin go too, with the promise that one day he will join them – when Bilbo is ready.

Thorin has told them that when his kin had first quit this place, he had refused to join them, and many long years he had spent in a self-imposed exile, torturing himself with a guilt that, Bilbo suspects, should never have been his to shoulder – he is a creature so full of grief and rage at his stolen mountain range, his lost vantage point for the stars, aching for all his kin who had been forced to flee their lands to escape. He blames himself for not being able to protect their home, but nymphs are not made for violence, and there was nothing he could have done to harm the men who came and tore down their mountain, even if he had tried – and Bilbo thinks, on the long nights when Thorin’s skin burns like fire, that he had tried. There are scars under his skin that come from denying his true nature, and though he never speaks of them Bilbo wonders, sometimes.

Forgiveness comes slowest for the self than it does for the other, but come it had, in the end: Thorin’s rage had tempered over the centuries, and he had found a peace in himself. Now he stayed for loyalty to his new land, this decrepit city, and for his new family.

He had been alone and afraid when first Bilbo and Bofur had taken him to their bed, holding him close with the promise that he was not the last of them, that he was not alone anymore; it had taken years, Bilbo thought, before Thorin had really believed either of them, believed that they were not going to disappear, that every new sweet thing was not simply going to burn away into smoke.

They are both ready to leave now, to quit their ruined rivers, their light-polluted skies, this old and broken city.

“We cannot stay,” Bofur tells him, his hands as soft as water as he skims over Bilbo’s shoulders, his mouth a whisper of a breeze against the back of his throat.

His skin is the chill of the deepest currents of the river, but his voice is warmth of the purest kind: the webs between his fingers are the softest thing that he has ever felt, and he kisses them gently, each of them as thin as spider’s silk and silvery when they catch the light. Bofur laughs into the kisses they share, his body moving like waves curling across the shore when they touch.

Bilbo’s body is the contours of land, and rivers know how to undo the earth.

He shivers.

“This world is not for us,” Thorin continues, kissing constellations into the freckles running down Bilbo’s arms, his voice the deep rumble of slow planetary movement.

His body is the heat of a forge in which truest beauty is made, but his hands are gentle, so very gentle, as if he is still afraid of touching: he murmurs when Bilbo buries his hands in that thick mane of dark hair, a low and quiet sound, and when he presses his nose into the line of Bilbo’s neck that hair feels like silk against his cheek.

His will has the deep strength of mountains, and the heat of his fire is almost enough to make Bilbo malleable.

But Bilbo can’t go, not yet.

Thorin is made of starlight: he can move and those stars are still with him, for he will always be beneath the skies: he will see constellations in every patterns, no matter where he looks, and it doesn’t matter where he goes, for their light is buried deep within him. He has moved through this world on his own pilgrimage, and he does not fear leaving one place for another, for nothing can hurt him the way the loss of his mountaintop did, not ever again.

Bofur is fixed to his waterways, cannot move far from them or leave them too long, but rivers are the veins of the land, and he has always had to follow their currents: he has always loved to move, to dance through unknown waterways, to explore the connecting steams and to dive in deep pools. He is not afraid of moving, either, has never been, for all those waterways lead back to one another, and no matter where he goes, he knows that they will lead him home again.

Bilbo has never left the land that was once his meadow: his bones are earth and the deep limestone bedrock and he is tied to them in ways that the others will never understand. This earth, this sweet earth, once lived, and though it is dead he still fears leaving it, for it is all that he has ever known, and he is linked to the land with a depth that is not that easy to simply sever.

He can still feel his meadow below the concrete, and the thought of leaving it all behind brings tears to his eyes.

 _Never let yourself care too much_ , a passing _Maenad_ had told him once, when the revelries of Dionysus had brought his cacophonous Thiasus to pass through the open spaces of Bilbo’s domain, to collect flowers for garlands to decorate their madness. Her eyes had been wide and staring, her teeth as hard as diamonds when she grinned. _When you care too much, you have been captured by that care, and once a creature of the wild has been caught, they will never be the same_. _For is a panther sitting on the lap nothing more than a house-cat, no matter what it might once have been?_

He had been tamed by his land.

It shackled him now.

 

* * *

 

Their kind did not need to sleep – they never had done. The mortal coil was not for they, and neither hunger nor thirst nor exhaustion ever crippled the never ending existence that they called life (though Bilbo often wondered if it could be called so, for what was life if there was no death to come calling?).

But nonetheless he had made himself a bed, for he found comfort in having somewhere to lie in gentleness when he had nothing to do, or wanted to think – and since his sweet grass and clover was gone now, he had to have something else. On rare bright days, the sunlight pooled in the room and onto the linen that he kept, old and faded and the softest eggshell colours now, and he basked in the warmth like a lizard on a rock.

Besides, though he did not need to sleep, sometimes he found comfort in doing so anyway – if nothing else, it made the hours slide by.

Over the years he had collected scraps of silk and velvet and the finest of lace: as far as he was concerned, those soft and beautiful fabrics were one of the greatest wonders that mankind had created, for he could not understand how they had come about. His kind dressed themselves in air or cloud or twisting grass or animal skin, and the concept of manufacturing was beyond him. But still, he had collected them for years until one day he had seen an old lady sewing, and had watched until he had figured out the trick. Soon after he began to join them together, into a big coverlet made up of all the colours of a natural world that no longer existed in this little place that had always been his own. It was all bright and soft greens and browns and the greys of shadows, with the flickering brightness of wildflowers brought through with tiny scraps of silks the colours of jewels.

It was stained dark in places from the damp of Bofur’s hair, from Thorin’s tears that came unbidden at the end of the night, from Bilbo’s tears, too – but he loved it none the less. It still grew, a little more every year, as he came across new wondrous scraps to add to it.

And when the city grew too much for him he buried his face in it, breathed in deep, and pretended that it was made of flower petals and woven grass instead, that he would wake up and find that life was how it had once been, that all of this was just a dream.

A dream for the sleepless: a comfort for the trapped.

He passed many days like this, as the years grew longer.

 

* * *

 

The other two had things to do to pass their days: Bofur’s kin had all left, and now all the interconnected rivers of his world were his to protect. He spent months as man count them following their courses, clearing them of shopping trolleys and oil slicks and the cast off waste of the world. Many had been cut off to him over time: houses built up over small creeks and thick ooze clogging up the ways so much that he could no longer make his way through them. Many had been diverted underground for sewage, and he did what he could for the filth of those waters, though as the centuries had turned and more and more chemicals entered the water and he had been forced to surrender them.

Sometimes he came back so covered in the slick of oil that he might have been a seal slipping through Bilbo’s door: other times the new chemicals left burns on his skin that took days to heal: he always laughed off the pain, no matter how red-raw he was by the time that he returned. They ran tender hands over those burns, putting their own energy into them in a poor attempt at healing.

He never complained for the days that he was there with them: he was only ever full of bright cheer, even when he came back from the worst of places.

Thorin had less of a distance to go, living as he did in an undisturbed and abandoned railway junction house on the outskirts of the city. Bilbo had often pointed out the empty buildings closer to the river, to Bilbo’s own place, but Thorin always refused, as if he still felt that a sort of self-imposed exile was what he deserved.

He hid away inside until the sun set each night: he sky was too bright in the day for his silver-star eyes, and the openness of it too wide for him to fathom. The city was too bright even now, and the light at night often caused him great pain, but on the outskirts he could see well enough, though often the sight of the stars left him in a stupor that he could barely wake from. He cleared the skies of clouds with a wave of his hand when he had the strength to, to let them shine all the brighter, but he was rarely strong enough to do that anymore.

Sometimes he left to different mountains, though none of them were his own and so many of them reduced from what they had been, and in many of them the distant light of cities was still in view. But he would lay among the peaks and burn along with the constellations above them until he left imprints in the heather that no man could explain.

And what did Bilbo do, in their absence?

He could always feel them on the periphery of his mind – now that they were the only three left, he could always hear them in the distance, where once they would have been drowned out by the sheer numbers of their kin. He could not hear or feel their pain or rage or grief, only their existence, and when they are gone he tries not to think about how long it might be until he sees them again.

The city covers all that had been his meadow: it grew up in the great industrial revolution in the new world, and there are no parks, only old factories. Perhaps one-day gentrification might have come to his city, modernised it and made room for greenery again, but that never happened, and now great old buildings crumble and decay, and he spends his time finding places to grow once more. It is not enough – it is never enough – but it gives him something to do.

Like Thorin he clings on to his roles of the past: like Bofur he longs for things to fill his lengthening days, ways to distract himself from the impossible present.

So he grows grasses out of cracks in the pavement, clovers out of crumbling walls: he finds red bricks that are falling apart and plants seeds deep in their core to break them. Where saplings push their way through concrete he helps them until they are strong enough to break down that which confines them. The damp moss begins to spout with tiny flowers at his touch, and he begins to use whatever land he can find. On the tops of bus shelters earth begins to collect, and in gutters too – from these tiny pockets of earth he pulls forth all the wildflowers that he has known and loved, though the acidity of the rain and the stench of the air means that they never last as long as they should, no matter what he does.

He hates cars, hates the scream of trains on the tracks, but he finds the verges between road and rail, and plants there, and some grow with surprising resilience. Plants are a glorious thing, he feels, always adapting in ways that he, that they, cannot.

The years pass, in the blink of an eye. The once busy streets become all the quieter, more and more buildings left to decay, and as another century rolls by he finds that his task is ever harder. For whilst man quits this place, an exodus that begins slowly and then all at once, their stain is such that it cannot be undone by his hand alone. He is not strong enough any more to pull down each building brick by brick, to take apart all that they have built.

Thorin’s absences grow longer as he loses himself to longing, as do Bofur’s as his own tasks grow, but they both always come back to him.

Every now and then comes a splash from outside his window, a gentle knocking on his door late at night, after the sun had tracked its lonely course to the horizon. And when those sounds came Bilbo would draw himself from his haze of longing, and let his old friends in.

 

* * *

 

Does he remember when they first found each other in this form of comfort? For all the length of time that it has been he does. Bofur first, for they have known each other far longer. He remembers the first time Bofur climbed from the new river when it was little more than a stream, his hair a dark snake down his back, his eyes bright with mischief and the good humour of the water-kin, ever laughing, ever joyful. Bilbo had startled at the sight of him, flitted away through grass that was already being limited in its spread, but Bofur had coaxed him out with song and music, swearing that he meant no harm, offering him shells and pretty stones as the gifts of a guest, until Bilbo had found himself smiling, despite himself.

His scales had glittered in the soft lines that they drew around his body, his toes webbed and his smile wide. He had kissed Bilbo on the mouth in greeting, and his soft gaze had wrapped around him in comfort when he realised his distress.

“Poor little meadow-nymph!” he had cried, his arms cool and gentle around him. “I know my river has cut through you, and I would be sorry for it, were I not so glad to meet you.”

The long stretch of the days were easier to live through with company, and Bofur was good company indeed: then one day he had lain Bilbo down on soft grasses and had kissed the worry from the corners of his eyes until he had laughed aloud from his tenderness. When they had done he sang songs to the lines of Bilbo’s body, and told him stories about the great serpents that had first made the rivers, in a time before their own.

He never knew if they were stories or fact, but he found that he could not bring himself to care.

For many years he had come to Bilbo thus, with comfort and affection, and the love between them was a sweet one, though different to any that man know. For immortals neither love nor feel as mortals, who are always aware of their ending: they love knowing that there will be no end to their lives. It had been to Bilbo that Bofur had come the first time the steel hooks of fishermen had snared through the webbing between his toes, worrying at that tender skin until the golden ichor in his veins began to flow with earnest. Bilbo had been the one to pull them free, cutting his own fingers in the process, whilst Bofur had stared with a small frown between his eyes into the distance, as if for the first time realising that man had the capacity to hurt them.

Bofur was with him when the town first appeared, when a city of metal rose out of stone, when the factories first started spewing their filth into the air. And it was Bofur that brought them Thorin, another love as lost as they.

Whereas Bofur bothered not with dress but for a slip of sealskin that he wore around his middle, Thorin shrouded himself in a mantle of darkness that he pulled and wrapped around his body as if it were linen. Some days all that you could see of him was the spill of his hair, the aquiline line of his nose: others he let the darkness fall down from him, revealing first shoulders and then more, so they could see the soft lines of his pale body. He hid from their sight when he felt their eyes too strongly, too used to lingering unseen. And when first he had been pulled into their bed (with the gentleness and slowness reserved for wild animals about to startle) his eyes had been wide with confusion and longing.

The softness of his body and the tenderness of his wide hands left them both breathless; it still did, after all these long centuries.

Love is an endless thing. Bilbo knows this – he has loved thousands of flowers, millions of stems of grass – compared to that, his heart could easily accommodate two.

 

* * *

 

The sky had cracked with pain when the Gods had left.

Bilbo had been lying on grass – there had been grass left to him, then – trying to ignore the stone buildings around him when he had heard it. It was an impossible sound, so loud that he shuddered, that he couldn’t believe that man could not hear it, but they went about their business unconcerned, not noticing that the Gods had quit the world, that they had driven out the greatest of divine beings that ever would tread this land.

The sound seemed to rend across the fathomless sweep of blue above him, and he did not understand for a moment what he had heard, what it meant.

But then he felt it.

The slow pulse of life that had always fed him, that had always been there to sustain his own movements, that which mankind called magic – it was seeping away. It had always seemed impossible, the idea of the Gods leaving this world, but gone they had, and with their disappearance left too just a little more of Bilbo’s hope for reconciliation, for change, for a return to the world which he had once known and loved. Men were still worshipping them, in their own way – but it was not enough anymore.

The world ends not with great acclaim or a moment of glory, but with a sound that man could not hear, with a sadness that the world seemed to resonate from.

No great moment, no weeping but for Bilbo’s own.

Everything began to fade, after that.

 

* * *

 

The _Melissae_ had been a strange group, even by nymph standards: those creatures of the bees kept to themselves, hiding away from the rest of the world, rarely engaging with anything else. When one had appeared in Bilbo’s meadows all those thousands of years ago, before man had come with their iron and ire, he had started in surprise, before his mouth had fallen open at the sight.

It had been a normal enough day, all things considered: he had introduced a new breed of butterfly to his meadows that morning, one which had just made its way across the lands to his little part of the world in recent days. He had followed it around for some time, making sure that it liked the grasses and flowers, and it had seemed content enough. He had presumed that his day would be spent alone, as they always were: the arrival of another nymph was always a surprise, for they were a solitary enough bunch at the best of times, but this rare sight was enough to make his breath catch.

She was clothed not in the fabrics of their own creation, her rich brown skin covered instead with golden honey, falling in semi-opaque waves down her and pooling at her feet, leaving a strange and sticky residue in her wake that insects swarmed around. Her crown of hair was jewelled with live bees, crawling through the black strands contentedly: her eyes were fixed on Bilbo, her expression blank, and a little intimidating.

The buzzing of the bees seemed to reach an almost feverous pitch for a moment, deafening, nothing that Bilbo had ever heard before, and he glanced around them wildly: the bees had always been his friends, had never hurt him, but right now they sounded like they could, swarming around the new arrival with a curiosity that was unmatched by anything that Bilbo had seen before.

But then the noise dropped, quite suddenly, and the nymph smiled, and half-glided through the grass towards him, nodding her head a little in greeting.

“This is your meadow?” she asked, though of course she would have already known that it was, and then she smiled as he nodded, her face lighting up, making her seem terribly gentle, fragile, all of a sudden.

“Welcome,” he said, still a little unsure.

“I bring you a gift,” she replied, and he relaxed a little – though company was rare, this at least was something that he was familiar – the reciprocal giving of gifts, the sign of friendship and hospitality given and received, the respect that it insinuated – it was all enough to make him feel a little more at ease.

She passed to him a golden honeycomb, dripping with sweetness, and he didn’t even mind when the stickiness of it clung to his fingers for the scent of it was overwhelming, the sweetest thing he had ever known, and he could not stop himself from licking it from his fingers, his smile growing just a little at the taste of it.

He gave her in turn a crown of lupines, flowers that his bees had always loved, and she touched it gently, reverently, before she placed it on her head.

“The bees like it here,” she said, her voice quiet. “I came to see if for myself, for they talk about it often.”

“Oh,” Bilbo said, his chest swelling with warmth and pride. “I’m glad of it, if I may say so, for they do good work here, and I try my hardest to grow the flowers that they prefer.”

She nodded, and seemed pleased with his answer, for from her hair flew a fat honeybee, who flew slowly and lazily towards him, landing on his still-sticky fingers.

“The bees speak often,” she said, quietly. “And they make for good conversation, for those who are willing to listen. They have stories the likes of which no other creature on this earth knows, for they are far wiser than many of them.”

Bilbo had swallowed, his eyes on the bee as it moved lazily down the length of one finger.

“I cannot understand them,” he said, quietly, and she moved closer, reaching for his face and tilting it towards her, to press a kiss on his forehead.

“Now you will,” she told him, and her voice was full of sunlight, full of sweetness. “And listen well to what they tell you, for they can feel the changes of the world long before the rest of us.”

And then she was gone, in a haze of pollen and a lingering scent of honey, and he smiled as he heard the bees sing for the very first time.

Perhaps he should have listened to them more, he couldn’t help but think, in hindsight.

They had been trying to warn him, even back then.

 

* * *

 

The longest time Bofur ever left them was when he went to the sea.

He had been restless for months before he took off, his eyes darting to the window and his river outside, his scales glowing all the brighter in the darkness of Bilbo’s cellar, as if trying to light and guide his way to the place that was calling him. His trips along his river courses grew longer as he went further, as if searching for something, though he never said anything – he didn’t need to.

There had been something strange and sombre about his farewells to them, in the end: normally so full of levity, pressing kisses to their faces and laughing at their downcast expressions until they could do nothing but laugh along with him. This time, though, his kisses has been full of desperation, lingering and full of grief, as if he had not been certain that he would return. It left them anxious as they watched the ripples of his dive disappear in the thick, sluggish waters, so dark now that they lost sight of him the moment his head slipped beneath the water.

“How long do you think he’ll be?” Thorin asked, the first time either of them had ever even thought the question, for what was time when it became meaningless, what was fear when you knew that the one you both loved could never die?

It had never occurred to them before that day that he might simply never come back, but now it was all that they could think about, a fear that crept into their hearts and held it fast and still.

Bilbo and Thorin has slept wrapped around each other the night that he had left, their fears unspoken between them, pressing as close as they could to each other as they tried to pretend that their bed did not feel so terribly empty as it did that night. The warmth of Thorin’s body, for the first time, did not feel enough to heat the space that Bofur had left behind.

It was months until Bofur returned to them: over a year, in fact. Time passed differently for them than it did for mortals, but for the first time Bilbo felt like he could understand the frantic way in which man lived their short lives, scrambling desperately for anything to do to fill their time so that they could at least pretend to be content with it. Bilbo planted more seedlings that year than any other, working from before the dawn to after the sun had made its bloody descent to the horizon: most of them died almost immediately, as he struggled to find the energy to nourish and grow so many at once when his strength was so significantly depleted. Thorin stared, lost and confused, into dark corners in Bilbo’s room, glancing up at any sudden noise from the water outside. He did not venture from the city, though Bilbo suspected that the mountains were still calling to him, as if he were afraid that he would miss Bofur’s return if he did.

Bilbo had known, of course, how much he needed his last two friends, had known how much he would miss them should they ever leave, but what he had not realised was how dependant they had grown on the three of them being together. Weeks, and months alone passed with ease normally, but as the time grew on he found that the two of them left behind grew more frantic, more desperate as they searched for each other beneath the scraps of silk that made their covers, more discontent in their loneliness. It would have been the same, Bilbo knew with a new clarity, had any one of them left the other two behind.

They took to watching the river, sitting in silence as they felt deep within them the distant presence of Bofur’s existence, often muffled over the vast space between them, but still there – still there.

And then one day Bofur returned: it occurred not with fanfare, not with applause, not even when the two of them were watching the still surface of the river for any movement, for any sign of him. No, he returned home unannounced, had crept up the stairs and pulled himself into Bilbo’s apartment without a word, just a tired smile in his direction before he crashed down on the bed.

He had fallen immediately to sleep, a sign of how exhausted he must have been, for rarely did an immortal need to rest. Damp water stains spread out across the silk around him, growing wider before they began to dry in the grey sunlight that pooled through the windows.

Thorin came over as soon as the sun set, feeling Bofur’s return in his bones as surely as Bilbo did himself, and they met with a wordless embrace in the doorway, wrapping desperate arms around each other in a deep and tangible relief. They studied him carefully as he slept, fretting and pacing as quietly as they could around the bed, like wild animals in a cage. The scales on Bofur’s skin were darker than before, they thought, and duller too in their iridescence, as if they had been stained by something, though they could not even guess at what; his skin was scarred with pollution burns that had been left to heal without any care made to speed the process, to ease the pain, and they strained as they stopped themselves from running scared fingers down the length of them to heal them as best they could, for fear of waking him.

There was seaweed wrapped around one of the strands of his hair, and shells threaded through parts of his matted mess of it too that they had never seen before.

He looked tired, and older, though that wasn’t possible, for they didn’t age.

“I’ve missed you,” was the first thing he said, several days later when he finally woke. His arms were already opened as he spoke, and the two fell into him, reaching around his cool, damp skin, clinging, pressing as close as they could, as if afraid that he would leave again.

“Where did you go?” Bilbo asked, and if his voice quavered a little then neither of the other two thought to point it out.

“I went to the sea,” he told them, his voice quiet, hoarse from disuse. “To those vast and perilous oceans that I have never travelled before. I’ve heard them calling-”

“For how long?” Bilbo asked, without quite meaning to, biting his lip as soon as he had spoken.

“Centuries now,” Bofur replied. “It was a quiet thing at first, but in recent years it has grown louder, desperate and longing. The oceans have been alone for so long now, you know. The last of my sea-kin disappeared along with those of the rivers, but there has been no one to keep them company, as I have tried to do for the courses that became mine.”

“Will you have to go again?” Thorin asked, and he sounded half-annoyed, as if angry with himself for having to ask.

“I went to find the reason for its grief,” Bofur said, and they thought that he would say something more, but his voice drifted away, his eyes on the window, distant and strange, as if he had heard something, as if he was distracted by something that was beyond their understanding.

“And did you find what you were looking for?” Thorin asked, his voice gentler than normal now, as if he had tempered himself.

Bofur shrugged, a movement that rolled through the other two, making Bilbo feel for a moment as if he were a wave crashing on the shore.

“Do you find what you seek on distant mountains?” Bofur replied, though not unkindly. Thorin’s reply was a gruff murmur against Bofur’s skin, the answer ‘no’ spoken without words.

“The rains from the mountains feed my rivers,” he said, his voice full of the melodic cadence of pouring water, half mesmerising. “They are bitter, now, though once they were pure, and the life of my rivers has been seeping away, slowly and surely: I tried for a time to stop it, to clean it enough to let the life continue, but it was an endless battle. I could not, not forever. The waters taste of death, and they roll down my courses, and into the next river, and then the next; all the rivers of the world are connected, do you know that? Over earth and under, through those secret passages through rock and dirt – you can pass around all the world just following rivers, without ever coming to the sea. And though I have seen the shores in my time, never have a followed the currents out to deep water, for it has never been my domain. But… the oceans have been weeping, have been calling to me for so long, and in the end I knew that I could ignore them no longer.

“So I went – I swam the deep courses, down to the darkest trench and through what had once been the most beautiful of coral reefs, dying and empty now. I swam through the great arching bones of whales, found the remnants of creatures than man never learnt off, saw the jawbones of beasts so large that even I feared to look at them – for that was all that left. Bones, just bones, sinking into the sea.”

He paused then, and his hands tightened around Bilbo and Thorin’s shoulders.

Bilbo swallowed: he could almost imagine him, could see Bofur swimming through water so deep that it was almost entirely dark, the movement of his limbs disturbing tiny skeletons resting on grey-gold sand.

“There was nothing left?” Bilbo asked, reluctantly, not entirely sure if he wanted to hear the answer.

Bofur shrugged.

“Some things. Some tiny creatures, weathering the storm in the rocks. Some seaweed too continues to grow, even in the worst of conditions. And the jellyfish – there is a strain that now absorbs the sickness of the water, and it seems to do them no harm, but they are few and far between, for there is little for them to eat.”

Thorin caught Bilbo’s eye across Bofur’s chest: he looked lost, unsure of what to say.

“I followed every current,” Bofur continued, his voice dreamy. “I have travelled every sea, every ocean. Every trench and sea cave and sunken ship has felt my touch: I know it all, though I never thought I would have a reason to. I travelled from the warmest waters to the coldest, right to the caps of the world, so much smaller now than they should have done, and saw great beasts of the past frozen in the ice that still clings to those once-great plains. There were boats still, here and there, with man in them, the last of them, searching desperately for anything to eat, but none of them ever found anything, and I wondered, sometimes, if I snared myself on their hooks, if they would see me, if they would taste my blood, if I would make them believe in possibility of the ocean for just a little longer, but… everything-” and his hands clenched all the tighter around them, as if he was trying to ground himself.

His voice was little more than a whisper, now.

“I found the sunken cites of my distant ocean-kin, in ruins now – I saw the Sea King’s trident, fallen from his throne, half covered in sand. He left it behind, when his quit his domain – left it all behind.

“Months I spent submerged,” he said, and his eyes closed. “Sometimes I wondered if I would ever resurface again, or if the dead glory of it all would keep me forever, would never let me return to my rivers, to my dying realm, to the both of you.”

“But you did return,” Bilbo said, searching for reassurance, for there was still so much distance in Bofur’s voice, as if a part of himself had been lost out there.

But then Bofur opened his eyes again, and looked down to the two of them, and there was that old familiar warmth, curling around them with a comfort that they both had missed so desperately.

“Aye,” he said, and though his voice was not quite what it had been, good humour seemed to have return to him, at least a little. “Aye, I came back – to the two of you.”

 

* * *

 

The time of man ends.

It was inevitable, of course: if his long life has taught Bilbo anything, it is the knowledge that all things must come to pass in the end, that all things must eventually die. There is no cataclysmic moment, as man expected: so vast was their reach, so extraordinary their gifts, that they could only imagine their end coming in one great apocalyptic event, one final catastrophe, something huge and fearsome and magnificent.

It doesn’t work like that in reality, of course. The greatness of man diminishes as they stretch themselves too far: they reach for the stars and for the depths of the seas, turning wide mad eyes to the impossible and ignoring what they are doing to their earth and to themselves in the process. Water shifts across the surface of the earth: some cities flood, others are left barren and empty. Forests turn to sand: farmland turns to stagnant marshes. Disease comes, and wars too, and all manner of things in between: Bilbo feels the tremors of bombs through the earth from miles away.

He watches man reach their end over several centuries: they have lasted even longer than he had imagined that they would, and as the last sparks of their light disappear across the globe he feels grief at their passing.

He has never known another animal more in love with life and death: he has never known a beast so intelligent and so fundamentally stupid at the same time, but he has surrounded himself with the debris of their creations, and he cannot help but wonder what would have happened if they had ever been able to hear the voices of the immortals who had lingered by their sides for so many years.

He wonders if they would have done anything differently: if this outcome would have been changed, if only they had heard his desperate pleas to protect his lands. 

Would they have listened to him, to Bofur, to Thorin? Would they have worked to fix the damage that they had done, to save themselves? Or would they have continued along the path that they had set themselves nonetheless, so convinced of their own existence that they were unable to conceive a world in which they did not live?

He weeps for them, for the ignorance, for the loss of their glory, for the beauty and potential and all that they achieved despite themselves. He weeps for what had happened, for what had never happened, for what could have been.

Everything is desperately quiet with them gone.

The smog of the air lingers for years: the chemicals they have created will not shift.

The world has been fundamentally altered.

They grieve at the passing of the earth's most destructive creation, and wonder at what will come next.

 

* * *

 

The last one of their kind that they ever see was not the one that they might have expected, for they had thought him gone, many centuries before – not one hint had they ever been given that he lingered still, though perhaps they should have realised, if only they had given it any thought. But the one thing that so often slips the mind of an immortal is death – and, more, what happens after death.

When the dread King of the Underworld came through Bilbo’s door he thought at first that he was dreaming – a strange dream, to be sure, but only a dream could have explained his presence – he had heard the rent in the sky when the Gods had quit this plain, and it had never occurred to any of them that the _other_ plain, the one of death and souls and fields of gold, might have been different still.

“They have all gone,” the King said, his voice solemn, and Bilbo started, wondering if the God had heard his thoughts, had read his confusion in his often expressive face. “But my realm has always existed in its own time, and I could not leave whilst man lived still, for what would come of them if I did?”

Bilbo sat down, on his bed, and swallowed.

From across the room Bofur and Thorin glanced at each other, moving closer together, their eyes on the tall figure commanding the middle of the room.

Hades had always been known for his stern face, but surely the stories had done it no justice: before them stood a God with a face carved from marble, as still and impossibly beautiful as a sculpture, no flicker of emotion on his features. He would have been beautiful, Bilbo could not help but think, if just his mouth were a little softer, his eyes a little more expressive.

He was garbed in silver and grey, shades of the two wrapped around him as a shroud might, but it caught the dim light from outside and shone in a way that no man-made fabric ever could.

“I did not consider it,” Bilbo remarked, when he realised that too long a silence had passed with him staring at the King, still unsure of what this audience was supposed to be in honour of.

“But now they have all gone,” Hades said, and his eyes were suddenly sad, his expression coming to life in just one moment, changing him from something distant and cold to something more real: something that could have turned into a smile hovered around his mouth, as if he had heard the punchline to a joke that no one else has ever been in on. “And now it is my time to leave, the last of my siblings. My Queen quit this place some time back, and I am not afraid to admit that I have missed her.”

Bilbo nodded, still a little disconcerted.

“But I have watched you,” Hades continued, either not noticing Bilbo’s agitated expression, or not wanting to mention them – and if that was the case, then it was very polite of him, for Bilbo had only grown all the more distressed at Hades’ last remark. “I have watched you for centuries.”

Bilbo swallowed, and Hades turned, casting his eyes over Thorin, and Bofur in turn.

“All three of you, in fact. And you have given me hope, when I felt that all else was lost.”

Thorin’s hands tightened into fists at his side, only half-covered by his own veil of darkness – Bilbo couldn’t tell if it was in anger or grief, for it was so often hard to separate them, where Thorin was concerned.

“When my brothers and sisters left,” Hades continued, his voice gentler now, looking Bofur in the eye despite the way he shifted under the gaze. “When I was the only one of us left behind, I saw the joy that you took in swimming your currents, and I found it in myself to continue my own work – for it has always been out of compassion, out of love. I chose the Underworld as my domain: I am one of the few immortals who had that chance, and in you I found the inspiration to carry on.”

His eyes turned next to Thorin, whose fists did not loosen. He met Hades’ eye with something that seemed at first to be agitation, but faded quickly into something much more difficult to explain.  

“I have watched you weep for your loss, so many times,” Hades said, and for a moment he seemed to hesitate. “And I wish that you had not seen the things that you have, that you had not lost so much nor lived through these times. But when I saw your tears, I remembered that gifts of love must be paid with grief in the end, and it made the loss of my own Queen easier to bear, for I could think on the love that had caused my sorrow, and the hurt was less keen. Did you know that, little star? Have you ever thought before that you could not grieve the way that you do if you had not known so much love?”

Thorin did not answer: it seemed as if his breath had been taken from his body, and he seemed to shrink in on himself in a strange and imperceptible way.

Hades turned, once again, to Bilbo, his shoulders slumping a little, as if he were tired: and Bilbo wondered, then, at how exhausted the Lord of the Dead must have been, after the last century that had seemed to come only with death, and destruction, and pain – how many souls had passed through his halls? How many weeping children had he comforted, all alone, in that distant realm that belonged only to him?

And then, for the first time ever (except, perhaps, in the secret company of his Queen), Hades smiled.

“In those waning years,” he said, quietly, “When all seemed lost, and our halls were full and our days seemed endless – days when Persephone’s grief for the dying world seemed all consuming – she would look with her endless eyes and watch your days spent growing flowers, would watch the way you pressed the fluttering scraps of your power into the earth to keep the grass growing, and sometimes she would smile again. And before I left, I needed to thank you, for the sweetness that the sight of you gave to my Lady – that all three of you gave to us both.”

The fearsome Queen, the true ruler of the Underworld and its King, the goddess more feared than any other in the reaches of the world – had smiled at his attempts to make forget-me-nots grow from cracks in the pavement?

Hades’ smile had faded, but the ghost of it lingered still around his eyes, making him seem warmer, more real.

“It is time for us to leave now,” he said, quietly. “Your friends know it, and I think you know it too – the time of man is over, and with their end comes the end of us.”

His eyes were distant, grey and solemn, as if they were looking at something that Bilbo could not see, and he was reminded quite suddenly of the enormity of the power that this God must still possess, even now when all of them had been diminished so much. Once this God and his Queen had wielded the hand of judgement over all the living, and even those immortals whose actions incurred the wrath of the Gods. The oldest son of Cronos, he who passed unseen, had powers that surpassed anything that Bilbo could ever have achieved: metals of the world had poured through the earth from his fingertips; the great waters of the Underworld had coursed from where he had stamped his feet; all turned their eyes from him for fear of drawing his attention, for though he had never been known for his cruelty none could forget those immortals imprisoned in his realm.

His bident gleamed from beneath his cloak: Bilbo’s eye was drawn to the shine of it, and he sighed.

“You are right,” he said, breathing out, and for the first time in centuries he almost felt as if the earth was breathing out with him. “But I will not leave, not quite yet.”

“What are you waiting for?” Hades asked, not unkindly. His voice, instead, was more like that of a some kindly elder, trying to offer advice, and love.

“A sign, I suppose,” Bilbo said, shrugging. “I’m not really sure. But I will know, when it is time.”

 

* * *

 

Thorin had sung, once.

They wouldn’t have known it, for he never brought it up, but for the odd occasions they had heard him on the rooftop of Bilbo’s building, eyes wide and silver, half lost to the night. No longer aware of the world around him, perhaps even forgetting that he was still a part of it, he would sometimes begin to sing.

They were the old songs, in tongues no longer spoken, languages that man had never known: the words were formless and beautiful and Bilbo couldn’t even remember what half of them meant after so many years, but he knew what the songs were about even so – those melodies had made him, were etched in the lines of his bones, were made of stronger stuff than he would ever be. They were songs of beginning, the songs that had first brought the lights to the night sky, grass to the barren earth, Chaos from the void to begin it all; these were the songs of their kind, the songs that had sung them all into existence, the first thing that had come from the emptiness before anything had existed. Thorin didn’t know all the words, or all the songs either, but he sang snatches, and Bilbo knew him well enough to know the words for the stars and the spiralling constellations above them.

Sometimes he wanted to ask whether Thorin was singing to the kin that he had lost, if he was trying to call them back to him, or if he was asking them to take him away from this place: he never worked up the nerve to ask. Whenever Thorin sang those melancholy songs his face was creased in grief, and he was afraid of the answer.

And then one day he sang a different song, one they had never heard before.

The Gods had gone, their kin were gone, and by that night mankind had gone too, lost to their own madness, burning up like some brilliant sun in the land that they had carved to their whims. The last of them had flickered out, dying candles of life in the vast darkness that they had cast themselves, leaving the three of them alone in the wilderness of the world, and this song was full of emptiness, full of that which had been lost. It twisted around them, bitter and longing, and as he listened Bilbo realised that this was the Song of Ending, the last thing left to them by that first breath of life, the one that he had never wanted to hear or learn or even think of – it hurt him to hear it, to realise that the twisted wreckage of all that was around them was empty and lost, now.

“I don’t know where I learnt it,” he said to them, later that morning, when they took to bed together. “It came to me, that last bitter-sweet melody, though I don’t know from where. Perhaps I was simply the last left to sing it.”

And Thorin lay there in the dark, singing words that the two of them had only half knew, his own form of grief for the dying of the world around them. He sang for what had been lost, for what could never be reclaimed, and in his deep and melancholy voice Bilbo felt the last shred of hope flutter away, like some frightened butterfly, into the dark night.

He sang to the stars, not to them, but Bilbo and Bofur listened none the less, leaning against each other, half mad from the desolation of the ruined world left around them.

 

* * *

 

The city is a ghost town, the buildings are crumbling; the slow consciousness of the trees wonders at the possibility of expansion in the future; the clouds pass overhead indifferently.

The river is sluggish and slow.

The stars haven’t paid attention to them in years.

Bilbo moves now with no speed – he struggles now to muster up the energy to do anything at all. The power that once lit his actions is almost gone, and now he finds it hard to even bring one plant out of the scraps of earth that he can find in a day, when once he could draw up tens – if not hundreds – in a long afternoon.

Thorin has always kept to the shadows of inside during the day, but now the light – as grey and unappealing as it is – seems to hurt him all the more. Even those heavy, overcast days leave him blinking in pain when the poor light falls through the window, and the full moonlight seems to only highlight how gaunt he appears now, how weak his once-strong limbs have become. They lose him in the night hours, and sometimes he doesn’t respond when they try and talk to him, even when they are not out under the stars: he traces constellations across the walls of Bilbo’s decrepit apartment, a frown marring his features, his body shrouded in darkness.

Bofur sleeps on the muddy river bank for much of the day now, half in the water, his skin covered in grit and filth by the time the evening comes around. His back is still scarred from his excursion in the ocean: in fact, he has never quite been the same since, more lethargic, as if he had given up too much of himself to see all that he did. He is no longer as fluid in his movements as he had once been: when Bilbo had first met him he had been like water, always in motion, smooth and beautiful to watch, but now he is like his own river, sluggish, as if he too had been filled with the residue of centuries of so-called civilisation.

His eyes are like Thorin’s now, staring and lost, as if he is seeing something that Bilbo cannot, no matter how much he tries.

Even his bees seem slower now: his hive is quieter than it has ever been, their numbers decreased, and he wonders what will happen to them, whether this world will even let them live for many more generations.

He tries to hope.

Bees are resilient, he thinks. Stronger than he has ever been.

And if even they are struggling, then it should be no surprise that he is, too.

The city seems painfully quiet now: he had not ever wanted to, but he had grown used the excessive noise of mankind.

Bilbo himself tries to force himself out of his bed whenever he can, and sometimes it lifts his spirits to see that some of his plants are rallying through the pollution of the empty city. But sometimes too it distresses him: there is grass growing on the embankments that he had no hand in, and it makes him feel painfully redundant, makes him wonder whether his place here had ever been of any importance.

“What was our purpose?” he wonders aloud, and Thorin shrugs.

“I can no longer remember,” he says, and Bofur traces patterns in the water that has pooled around his feet.

“What is purpose,” he asks, “but that which we make it?”

Bilbo doesn’t know how to answer. They stumble into bed together in the early hours of dawn, and try to distract themselves from the silence and the lethargy with frantic kisses, with desperate touches.

The energy of the earth has gone, the power that has sustained them is almost spent. For all his wisdom, for all the years that he has lived, he had never once considered that their vitality had come as much from mankind as from any other source: without them, everything is lifeless, for nearly everything is extinct now, and without that life, there is nothing for them to feed on. Everything becomes hard, then harder still. Their ventures further afield cease: Bofur says that he cannot hear the ocean anymore, that he cannot hear anything at all.

Thorin doesn’t say anything, but when he returns from the roof he does so looking lonelier than ever before.

The pink light of the rising sun is gentle, but the world it lights is not, not any more.

Buildings rot, just like the bodies from the last plague that had wiped out the last vestiges of man and beast; the stench of death is in the air.

We are coming to an ending, in one way or another.

But still…

There is a windowsill, that still catches the sunlight sometimes. Shells and river stones litter the surface, and some careful hand has moved them into the patterns of the constellations, both those still in view and some that have disappeared. Between them, small seedlings are planted in old containers, sometimes even in the deeper shells themselves.

There is a fine layer of dust covering them; the room inside it still and quiet.

The seeds struggle to grow; they are brown, and weak.

 

* * *

 

When change finally comes, it comes as fire.

They don’t know how it starts, but Bilbo feels it first, as his bus-stop wildflowers withering in the heat, crisping and dying with such alacrity that it starts him from his stupor. The day had passed with the swiftness of summer swallows, and he had lost the daylight hours to dozing on his bed of silks, when all of a sudden he had been shocked into full waking with the feel of it all, flames licking buildings in the distance.

He climbs to the roof on the old, creaking fire escape, and at first the horizon looks as it should: the sky above him is an inky blue, waiting for night, and there is a line of orange light before him. But it isn’t the sun sinking to its slumber, no – it is the curse of all things good and green, fire, come to take the city back into itself.

Everything feels oddly still, too quiet, and he cannot put his finger on what it is that has changed.

Wild geese above him wing away quickly, and for a moment his eyes follow them. They are the first mammals that he has seen in months.

Bofur arrives soon after, his hair wet and slick and his beard still dripping with river water. His eyes are wide, and his scales seem to sparkle gold in the growing firelight. He does not say anything to Bilbo as he takes his place beside him on the edge of the roof, but he does take his hand, though Bilbo knows not whether he is trying to offer comfort or take some for himself.

“What happened?” he asks, but Bilbo does not know. Fire has never been his friend, and the same fear that once sparked in his breast at the sight of settlers’ campfires comes again now.

“I did not see it,” he answers, though he thinks Bofur already knows his answer from his startled expression.

Thorin joins them soon enough, his eyes dark as he takes in the sight of them, but he says nothing at all, just stands on the other side of Bilbo. His hands are fists on the small wall that runs the edge of the flat roof, his eyes roving across the buildings around them. 

The hive on his roof is silent, Bilbo realises, looking around: the bees have gone. Perhaps they flew at the first sight of licking flames in the distance, perhaps they knew that something was coming, in that instinctive way that animals so often do, and escaped before they succumbed to the smoke and burnt in their slumber. Like the geese, perhaps they knew that they could escape, and fled without waking him. He hopes that is the case. The hive has existed, constantly changing, for centuries now: he has known so many generations of them, and they have earned their survival.

The plants are already seeming to draw into themselves, feeling the distant heat: they know that their end is coming.

The skyline grows brighter with fire: it is a morbid sight, and he feels the heat against his face and shudders. It is growing closer, ever larger, and there is no one left in this ghost city to put it out, to protect the wreckage of man’s own hand. There are thousands of plants growing in the wreck of the city, he knows this – each stem of grass he feels in his gut as the flames take them, and they might have been screaming aloud for how unable he is to ignore them.

This is his world – this is his domain.

But then, beneath the burning buildings, he feels the earth begin to stir for the first time in centuries, as if aware of what is going on above its dark depths.

“We cannot stay,” Bofur tells him, and his voice is full of grief, full of sorrow.

He has said those words many times before, but never have they sounded so certain, so solemn.

Below them, the ash is already landing in the river, turning its dark depths grey – in the distance they hear a great crash as a building collapses, giving in to its decay and subsidence and the new attack of fire and sinking into the water, and Bofur winces as he feels it, choking up the waterways, full of ash and death and the poison of the pollution engrained in its bricks.

He does not say it aloud, but slowly the river is being choked up, and soon he will not be able to escape this place should they mean to stay on this earth.

The soil is waking though, and Bilbo is distracted: as the buildings collapse and man’s materials crack under heat it seems to sense its encroaching freedom. There is so much ash in the air but all he can think of is the life that death brings in turn: there has never been so great a fertiliser as residues of fire.

“This world is not for us,” Thorin agrees, his tone almost regretful now as he is faced now with the burning of the world that they had made their own.

Many times before has he said this – but now he sounds as if he really means to leave, and has already begun to mourn the place that they have called home.

The smoke obscures the skies above them: not even the moon can force its way through the great blanket of it. Thorin is looking pained, his eyes darting across the sky, anxious now that he cannot see his kin above him, his constant friends. He keeps flicking his hands, Bilbo notices, trying to clear the smoke but it will not obey him like the clouds will, and every time he manages to clear a little more pours into the gap, choking the air.

Thorin already looks like he wants to flee, to leave this land and go to the next, where his family preserved in the skies wait for him in ichor and flesh. But he waits as Bilbo hesitates, for he will not leave this place without them.

The fire burns brighter: it hurts to stand there now, and the crackle of it is deafening. Bofur has closed his eyes to the heat of it, but he looks strangely peaceful. Thorin does too, now Bilbo thinks about it, and when he shoots him a curious glance the nymph shrugs, the darkness that he normally keeps wrapped so tight around him falling off his shoulders and down to the ground, leaving his chest bare to the heat.

“Fire ends it all,” Thorin says, quietly. “And should it all burn, ‘tis best we burn together.”

They would stand with him, despite the insufferable heat. They cannot die, but they will wait as the city smoulders, would stay here forever, if that was what he needed.

He looks to Bofur: he smiles at him, a soft and gentle thing, and squeezes his hand.

The earth feels content beneath them: it seems to sigh. It is going back to sleep, Bilbo knows, but it is a different sort of sleep, more one of hibernation than death. There is no one putting out the fires, and the longer it rages the more of these old derelict buildings it will clear. When the fire finally dies, and the morning comes, the sun will break through the smoke to reveal the place levelled, thick layers of ash covering the ground. There will be steel and iron left behind, but the brick and mortar and old concrete will be broken down in time, reclaimed to the earth: so too will the metal sink beneath the soil, eventually forgotten.

The ash will feed his good earth, and from it the grass will grow again, sweet and young and new.

But it can do it without him: it _will_ do it without him, for the earth has a power all of its own. Their guiding hands have only ever been there to help, to nurture what would always have come to pass. The river will clean itself over the years, roll what it cannot break down to the vast fathoms of the sea, and fresh rain will bring new waters. He had not been happy when the river had first been diverted across his land, but it is a part of it now, and return it will, bringing new life along its course.

And that water will feed the life in his meadows too. New plants will grow in the grass, new flowers will seed, and along with them will come the insects, the small animals, the little creatures that he has long missed; the bees will remember their once-home, and once the danger passes and flowers return so too will they, growing stronger and in larger numbers once the threat of man has passed.

Watching it all will be the stars above them, free of the lights that have veiled them, seeing all this come to pass beneath them with their timeless, endless gaze.

His meadow will return: all things in life are cycles, and it will begin anew. Their place is gone, their time is over – already they have drawn out their presence too long, he knows, though he has not been willing to admit it to himself before. Something else will come to protect this place, for Gaia leaves nothing on her surface unguarded. He knows not what will come, only that it will: he feels it now that he thinks of it, and he wonders how long it has been there, a new magic pulsing at the gateway between worlds, just waiting for their absence so that they might fill it.

It feels bright and beautiful and full of potential.

“It was a sweet life, wasn’t it?” Bilbo asks, and from beside him, Bofur and Thorin murmur their agreement.

“Sweeter still,” he remarks, when the silence between them stretches even longer, “for having had the two of you as a part of mine.”

They smile at him then, and at each other, and they press closer to each other, a huddle on a crumbling building surrounded by fire, and Bilbo breathes in deep, and treasures the feeling of too-cold and too-hot skin pressing into him at the same time.

Every age has its magic. They belonged to man: man, who creates creatures in their own image only to forget them again. But man is gone now, and Bilbo does not know what will come to believe in this new magic. Perhaps the bees will finally have their time to shine: he does not know, and more to the point, he realises now that it is not for him to concern himself with.

Bilbo knows all of this with a clarity and a truth that he cannot deny, with the prophecy that their kind finds in their most bitter moments: the grief that he has held tight in his breast for so many years begins to loosen, and with a sigh he nods his answer to his companions.

_This life, this sweet life, without end and so full of loss: when he had been young, and newly formed, and he had worn crowns of wild thyme in his hair, he could not have imagined how much his life would come to change._

Thorin swallows, casting one last look to the smoke-filled skies, before reaching out both of his hands and taking hold of Bofur and Bilbo’s each.

“So it comes to pass,” he says, and there is a shudder in his voice.

“Aye,” Bofur answers, and already the light is changing around them as they leave this place.

“To pastures new,” Bilbo breathes, and the light takes them.

 

* * *

 

There is a meadow: its grass is lush and green, its stretch broken only by the occasional steel girder, upon which is growing now beehives and insect nests.

All is quiet.

In another world, a nymph turns his eyes to violet skies.

He smiles.

 

* * *

_You’ll return as a wild thing, the_  
_un-huntable that roams forests,_  
_and mountains. This transition will_  
_be a seamless one, from tired eyes_  
_to shining; I can already see you glancing_  
_out the corners of them, I can hear_  
_the soft sounds of your footsteps_  
_on the moss._  
_Did they see your final breaths rise, did they_  
_see them swirl above you before_  
_vanishing into the dark woods,_  
_before filling the lungs of some new_  
_beast, perfect in its infancy?_  
_Let them hold the goodbyes_  
_on their tongues, let the world_  
_believe you departed, but I,_  
_I will stare into the trees and whisper,_  
_Welcome Home._

[\- Tyler Knott Gregson](http://tylerknott.com/post/140045919537/typewriter-series-1431-by-tyler-knott-gregson)

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Illustration for This Sweet Life](https://archiveofourown.org/works/6919345) by [procoffeinating](https://archiveofourown.org/users/procoffeinating/pseuds/procoffeinating)




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